Come Together – Aine Duffy
Recorded on August 29, 2010, original version recorded on July 21, 1969.
Aine Duffy: Vocals
Roger Greenawalt: Ukulele
Produced by Roger Greenawalt at Shabby Road Studio in Brooklyn, NY
Essay by Roger Greenawalt
About the Song
John is dead, George is dead, and I’m not feeling at all well. Come Together is a song about Death. Death is sexier and bigger than ever. Come Together is a meditation on morbidity; it is apocalyptic, right out of Revelations. The first lyric is “Shoot Me,” a creepy prefiguring of Lennon’s actual murder. We move on to a borrowed line from Chuck Berry, a god like figure to John.
“Here come old flat top He come grooving up slowly.” Well, who the hell is “He?”
“He got joo joo eyeball He one Holy Roller”
“He” is the Old Testament God, joo joo is a pun on Jew and juju, voodoo/blues mojo religion, and Holy Roller is a pun on God/Chuck Berry/Fire And Brimstone Preachers.
“He got hair down to his knees”
God and Jesus both have long hair. So did John. “Got to be a Joker he just do what he please.” This was a reference to the future hit by Steve Miller. (I quoted this song two weeks ago in the bassline of the bridge to Dear Prudence.) God does whatever he wants, whenever he wants. Because God can’t die. God is like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, unable to commit suicide. The chorus is “Come Together right now over me.” This is a sex and death pun, describing a simultaneous orgasm in Cowboy Position or more simply, a funeral. John is the corpse in the ground, having been shot at the top of the song, and everyone is at the funeral. They are Over and Above him in the graveyard.
“He say one and one and one is three, got to be good looking cause he’s so hard to see.” This is another dig at Christianity, specifically the Trinity, “He’s” so hard to see because “He” doesn’t exist. And what does the Holy Ghost do anyway. Is it a boy or a girl? Whatever this song is about it definitely is not about “What a great world our elders have made for us let us unquestioningly obey all authority figures.”The message of Come Together is closer to the opposite of that. It’s message is more like “Let’s Come Together And Have Sex on Heroin.”
It was risky to attack authority in the 60’s while having sex on heroin. It’s risky now. People may not remember that The Beatles and Muhammed Ali were the first major celebrities to speak out against the Vietnam War. Ali paid a terrible price for this. John Lennon also ridiculed Christianity, correctly predicting the current secular Europe, and therefore he is a great Atheist Hero, like The Marquis de Sade and Christopher Hitchens. Lennon may be rightly called the first Atheist Saint, (Sainthood technically requiring an early, violent death.)
Come Together, like the rest of Abbey Road, is beautifully recorded. Great simple guitar riff at the top, iconic Ringo tom tom/hi hat drum fill that is also a hook, Lennon attacking the words “Shoot Me” with an echo trail to convey the mood of menace. This is the set up for a horror movie.
The chord progression is a D minor blues. Spooky feeling, complementing the wordy lyrics that are delivered in a sort of detached zombie like religious chant. Our narrator is literally and figuratively deceased. He is not resting. He is a Norwegian Blue.
Paul’s Rhodes piano playing is fantastic; his bass playing supportive and solid. John’s vocal has a very mid-range EQ with delay that sounds old fashioned and retrofuture at the same time.
The solo starts on Rhodes, then George does his usual bendy lots of space guitar solo. McCartney sings a lower harmony on the last 3 verses, which is unusual; he is typically the top voice. Very compressed ride cymbals at the end, long fade out, “Come Together, yeah”
There’s a sort of gurgling choking on blood sound that John does near the fade out, just to keep the creepiness alive. The song went to Number One on the charts in December 1969. It was replaced at Number One by “Na Na Na, Hey Hey Hey, Goodbye”. Weird.
It remains sickening to me, still hard to fathom almost 30 years later, that some idiot assassinated John Lennon. That this is the hideous ending of his hero’s journey is so depressing. Everyday I wake up and he’s still dead.
But life goes on anyway. With or without us.
Today we shake our spindly ukulele crippled finger fists and weak damaged limp wrists of anxiety together at Death.
He’s just a one trick Pony after all.
No follow through.
Aine Duffy can be found in 2 seconds on the Internet. She’s amazing and such good fun to be around.